Amazingly, this is only the second play
to be staged in the body of Canterbury Cathedral itself; even T S
Eliot’s Murder In The Cathedral
in 1935 was put on in the Chapter House rather than, as Sebastian
Barry’s newly commissioned piece is here, in the nave. Both the play
and Roxana Silbert’s production for Paines Plough (as part of the
Canterbury Festival) use the location for its atmosphere and
associations rather than as a specific setting. Robert Innes Hopkins’
set, an undulating abstract hillscape, serves as the land of
Elizabethan County Cork where the eponymous protagonist lives most of
his life, the area around Canterbury to which he makes two pilgrimages,
or simply a podium from which he can tell his story. (The pulpit serves
as another such for his accuser, the dourly righteous Mrs Reddan.) The
lighting works its effects not only on the actors but on the stone
latticework around them; at a few moments, actors are seen some way
behind the stage atop the steps to the Choir, as if overseeing the main
action.

This is a space for declamation, not necessarily loud but formal.
Barry’s script is principally a matter of storytelling rather than
dramatic interaction between characters: Sweetman tells his story,
contradicted by Mrs Reddan, that we might judge his unquiet spirit
after nearly four centuries. The poetical phrasing adds to a sense of
near-ritual in the delivery of the lines. Fortunately, the lead players
find the right mode in which to operate. Bríd Brennan’s mouth
composes into a thin, humourless smile when not condemning Sweetman,
who is played by the protean Conleth Hill. Hill is one of my favourite
actors, and yet I do not think I have ever recognised him upon his
first entrance, so fully does he inhabit each role. Here he pleads his
innocence of charges of molestation and murder with perhaps more
eloquence than his lumpish manservant could plausibly command, but he
is always believable in his own performance.

This is a greater event than it is a play. Man Booker nominee Barry
illustrates the “Old English” Irish Catholic nobility’s resistance to
Tudor Protestantism whilst remaining loyal to the crown, and even
recounts Henry VIII’s posthumous trial of Thomas Becket for treason and
heresy. The play seems to be taking rather an Old Testament turn during
the second of its three successive and self-conscious endings, until we
are presented with justice tempered by mercy, and revenge forgone, a
conclusion in keeping with both the ethos and the daunting, superhuman
scale of the venue.